Centrepiece
Nuisances to authority
Cohn Welch
Dr Jenkins, the 'enlightened' Bishop of Durham, has declared that a Chris- tian bishop is bound not only to deplore violence but to press searching questions about its causes. The kind of searching questions Dr Jenkins might ask and the answers he expects to get are clearly adumbrated in accompanying remarks. He has, it seems, to risk the 'appearance of bias' by drawing attention to the case of those who get least out of society. He has further to make himself 'a nuisance to those in authority' (excluding presumably himself) by suggesting that, because their power is great, they should make conces- sions and accept partial and temporary defeats. He implies that violence (and whatever small risk there may be of 'a revolution organised by a Bolshevik-type minority') springs from the working classes feeling themselves helpless and ignored.
The Bishop is not far from saying that, since violence springs from injustice and legitimate grievances, the greater the vio- lence the greater presumably the injustice and grievances. To his searching questions, the ideal answer might come from a sob- bing picket: '18 hours a day down there in 'ell, tearin' at t' face with yer bare 'ands, the wife an' weans too, nekkid, pullin' heavy carts, firedamp, explosions, chokin' doost, only dry croosts to eat, no meat, an' me coughin' an' the bailiffs in, an' when they took the very roof off of our 'eads, soomthin' snapped an' I went berserk an' threw this stoan at the coppers' — no thoughtless reference to car, Spanish holi- day or mortgage. It is a pity that the Bishop was not present when, say, during the Kristallnacin, Nazi thugs smashed Jewish shop windows or when SS guards beat out the brains of babies against doorposts. Would he have wondered what injustices and grievances could have driven men to such excesses? Would he have heard in their actions 'cries for help'? I doubt it: but what would he have thought, what search- ing questions would he have pressed?
It is undeniable that violence may be justified or necessary on some rare occa- sions, for instance to rescue a policewoman pursued and kicked by 50 youths. But to pretend that much or most of it proceeds from any legitimate and well-judged intent to redress one's own wrongs or other people's is absurd. As bishops should know full well, violence can be fuelled by every evil motive and state — anger, greed, covetousness, envy, lust, drug- dependence, drunkenness (one miners' leader who overturned his car, had 232 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres aboard, an amount which produces in
some a benign torpor, in others bad driv- ing, in others violence). Violence may proceed from no rational motive, from madness or that thirst for excitement which, in miners presumably as in Bulling- don members, makes violence self- justifying. And of course violence may be sanctioned by philosophical aberrations. 'Violence, spontaneity and the Ethical' these, according to Mary Warnock, were the features that drew the egregious Sartre to Maoism. Are the miners inspired by Sartre, or Sorel?
That there are social causes of violence, individual as well as mass, is also undeni- able. What they are is matter for further searching questions. In history, extreme poverty and even widening inequalities have not often led to violence. Revolution- ary violence is usually associated with diminishing inequalities, increasing pros- perity and expectations correspondingly raised. Miners' wages, typically, are well above the average.
The Bishop might perhaps answer his own searching questions with words like inequality, injustice, 'relative poverty', de- privation, alienation and anomie, and draw attention to the systems and structures which supposedly cause these modish evils. May I draw his attention to one or two social causes perhaps less congenial to him. One is the decay of Christian belief. Among bishops, indeed, this seems to engender not violence (save perhaps by proxy, as in supporting African 'freedom- fighters') but rather, by removing the last thing once thought worth fighting about,' an ovine pacifism. But no one aware of the contrast (perhaps a shade idealised) be- tween the sweetness, patience, altruism and zeal for self-improvement of the Victo- rian non-conformist working man and, say, the rude contumacy of Mr Scargill can suppose that the bishops have done their stuff well — or, for that matter, ever did.
Another social cause of violence is the widespread withdrawal of the police and the law from large areas of life. Police violence against pickets has been ritually excoriated by the Left. Yet I can't readily think of any other country not already plunged in chaos, nor of any other time in our own country, where and when so much crime has gone for so long unpunished save for the odd tap on the wrist. Who in his right mind would expect violence not to flourish, where it is unpenalised, where the families of the violent (members of a union with £32 million in the bank) are kept by the taxpayer, and where banks and build- ing societies rush to waive interest and repayments on big mortgages, some con-
tracted since the strike began, and to offer new loans? Shouldn't shareholders in some of these institutions take steps to protect their interests? I'm not saying that all striking miners are violent; but the violent are among the recipients of benefits sho- wered on all, are among those whose mortgage debts are paid by the state with money which they divert to other pur- poses. No violent picket has, so far as I know, expressed contrition for anything: only a deputy chief constable has apolo- gised.
To illustrate the prevailing temper, may I cite the strange agreements reached by the police and CND demonstrators at Wethersfield, reported by Peter Martin in the Mail on Sunday magazine? Police and demonstrators agreed at Wethersfield that the law could be broken, but peacefully; and so it was. No 'mad gelloping or rugby tackles', the inspector promised. Thus was avoided 'a front page story: police and demonstrators fighting, fences cut, in- juries, arrests, prison sentences'. The law cares not for trifles, we are told; but a trifle too many breeds that anarchy which .was predicted by the retiring head of the CID as the result of 'softly softly' policing. Are we moving towards a situation in which the police, usually outnumbered and lacking self-confidence, will wink at law-breaking, provided confrontations, in which they cannot rely on general public support, are avoided? If so, I blame not the police by the widespread left-inspired disrespect for police and the law which the police (and the violent) are beginning to take for granted. The seamless garment of the law is rending and rotting before our eyes.
And in Brixton itself, the prime benefici- ary of soft, wet Scarmaniac policing, as Peter Levi mentioned the other day, mug- gings have gone up by two-thirds and burglaries by one third since it was intro- duced. I know of no sudden increase In poverty and injustices there to warrant any such increase, though doubtless such evils will grow as a consequence of what is going on. Crime hits the old, weak and poor disproportionately. One of the social causes of violence which searching questions would, if asked, reveal is the false penal philosophy which severs crime from punishment. It is parti- cularly disrespectful of two rights — one the right of the citizen to be protected against wrong-doers, the other, less obvious but not less important, the right of all of us to be protected by the prospect of penalty against doing wrong ourselves. Bishops above all should be aware of original sin. and should know that fallen man needs what help he can get to stay on the straight and narrow. Many are serving long terms now because they were not punished prop- erly when young. This philosophy forgets what Coleridge said, that the world is not a pretty girl in petticoats but a madman in a straitjacket. Like the sleep of reason, the sleep of the law brings forth monsters.
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